Henry Taube

Taube, Henry, 1915–, American inorganic chemist, b. Saskatchewan, Canada. He earned his Ph.D. at Berkeley, became a professor of chemistry at Univ. of Chicago (1952), and then moved to Stanford Univ. in 1962. He won the 1983 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his pioneering research in inorganic chemistry and the study of the rates and mechanisms of transition-metal coordination compounds. Taube determined that certain octahedral complexes containing transition-metals are inert while others are labile, depending upon whether they undergo ligand-substitution reactions rapidly or slowly.